About Catherine Wagner

Catherine Wagner’s photographs investigate the relationship between various systems of knowledge and the institutional environments that house them. She has explored the art museum, the laboratory, retail spaces, the home, and the amusement park—each as spaces with a series of instruments and encoded practices that structure identity. Wagner revels in visually mapping typologies onto one another and arranging inanimate objects to suggest the human form. “Throughout my practice I've been interested in ways of seeing, feeling, and learning about larger issues that are made possible through more abstract or oblique methods,” she says. “The images in this series are at once very literal, but open up a conversation well beyond their specificity.” Wagner has also created public site-specific installations out of her photographs, projecting her interrogation of structure onto a larger scale.